Goodwill Industries of the Valleys was facing performance issues
related to SharePoint backups and their Kronos workforce
management application. They were also spending an enormous
amount of time to regain space on their HP LeftHand SAN by
constantly creating new data stores and migrating data, since
there was no other way to shrink thin-provisioned volumes on
LeftHand SANs as result of file fragmentation.

The Customer

Goodwill Industries of the Valleys is a non-profit organization dedicated to
helping people with disabilities and disadvantages overcome barriers to
employment and gain greater independence. With over 1,000 employees,
Goodwill Industries of the Valleys is part of a network of local, autonomous
Goodwill member organizations in the United States and Canada.

The Challenge

According to Matthew Thompson, Database Systems Administrator,
backups of their SharePoint databases were “hideously slow,” taking
four to five hours to complete. Since Matthew didn’t want to run backup
operations during business hours due to the excessive load on the SAN,
he ran them on Friday evenings. The backups required his onsite presence
due to the fact that systems needed to be backed up individually since
they would typically timeout as a batch job.

In addition, the Kronos workforce management system would be reduced
to a crawl during peak hours. There was not enough available throughput to
keep up with demand.

Perhaps the biggest struggle was the waste of Matthew’s time spent
managing capacity on their HP LeftHand SAN. Matthew would spend 40
hours every month creating new data stores and migrating data, since
there was no way to reclaim space or shrink volumes from thin provisioning
on the LeftHand SAN. Excessive file fragmentation ballooned volumes,
and he could only reduce the size by moving the data to a new, clean data
store so writes could be written cleanly as a single contiguous file.

“At the time we thought our only option was a premature rip-and-replace
of our SAN architecture. Since a $300K expenditure wasn’t a luxury we
could afford at the time, we needed a way to improve I/O performance
on the hardware infrastructure we already had while also finding a space
reclamation solution,” said Matthew.

The Solution

Matthew looked into V-locity® I/O reduction software. Being somewhat
skeptical that a 100% software solution could solve all his performance
issues, Matthew reached out to the Condusiv sales team for an evaluation
of V-locity in his real-world environment.

Installed on Windows VMs at the operating system layer, V-locity
nondisruptively optimizes I/O at the source — reducing the I/O requirement
for any given workload which accelerates both reads and writes. The entire
infrastructure derives benefit because only productive, contiguous I/O is
pushed through the servers, network and storage.

With IntelliWrite® I/O reduction technology, V-locity sequentializes
otherwise random I/O created by the “I/O blender” effect of multiple VMs
funneling I/O streams down to the hypervisor. By reorganizing this random
pattern to behave sequentially as a single, contiguous I/O, less I/O is
required for any given file. Since more data is now processed with each
I/O operation, organizations achieve far greater throughput and improved
response times. Subsequent reads also benefit, since only minimum I/O is
required to fulfill the data request.

With IntelliMemory® caching technology, V-locity further reduces I/O
demand on the underlying storage layer by caching active data within
available server memory.

The Result

“After V-locity was deployed, SharePoint backup times were cut in more
than half. Backups that took four to five hours now take just two hours.
I now have my Friday evenings back,” said Matthew.

On the SharePoint servers, V-locity dropped 16,162 I/Os per GB down to
5,982. The I/Os per GB were reduced by more than half. The servers went
from being able to process 86.5GB/hour to 162.7GB/hour.

The servers running Kronos workforce management software saw
throughput double as well. Prior to V-locity, it took an average of 2.64
minutes to process 1GB of data with a maximum of 22.72GB per hour. After
deploying V-locity, the servers running Kronos could process 1 GB of data in
1.26 minutes with maximum throughput jumping to 47.54GB per hour.

Since V-locity optimizes I/O at the VM layer, it ensures files are written in a
clean sequential manner. Matthew no longer had the fragmentation issues
that ballooned volumes on his HP LeftHand SAN.

“Fragmentation issues on the SAN meant that I would spend four days a
month simply creating new data stores and moving data to it. It was the
only way we could reclaim space and shrink thin-provisioned volumes
on the LeftHand SAN. But since V-locity proactively eliminates 95-100%
fragmentation at the OS layer, that means everything is written to SAN
storage in a clean sequential manner. I no longer lose 40 hours a month
babysitting my systems,” said Matthew.

How can we help?

Business Users
Want to talk to a live sales representative?
CALL 800.829.6468